tried pi/roman's suggestion, couldnt get it to work the way i wanted.. Forgot to post.. Sorry about that.

@orengolan
All those links dont work for me.. And im not surprised 10.04 doesnt have any fixes for this issue. Theres lots of other "important" stuff which goes on. Wish they fully supported some of the common hardware tho, would be nice.

It's for the ASUS G50 and others(?) that have electroluminescent lighting around the touchpad. It gets false positives on a lot of machines that don't have this feature like my G51J. Note that this is NOT the same as the touchpad lights on some U series notebooks. It's for a single light that is on the border of the touchpad, not lights that are actually on the touchpad itself.

Last edited by ALLurGroceries; April 25th, 2010 at 04:55 PM.
Reason: add bit about leds

UPDATE: This patch set (3/4 of it at least) has been included in 2.6.34-rc7
To find out your kernel version, run: uname -r
If you are running 2.6.34-rc7 or later, create /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.conf and add the line: options psmouse force_elantech=1
DO NOT do the above if you are running an older kernel than 2.6.34! Proceed directly below to Step 1.

Step 1IMPORTANT: BACK UP THE EXISTING MODULE FIRST! You can revert to the .backup copy if things go wrong.

DO NOT run the above command twice. You may lose your good backup copy of the module; to restore the backup see 'IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG' at the bottom of this post.

Note: I modified this post to work for stock kernels. If you're running a custom kernel that you built from source, you don't need to go through all of this. Instead, cd to your source directory, make sure the elantech option is on in your .config (step 4), apply the patches (step 5) and make drivers/input/mouse/psmouse.ko then insmod it (step 7) to see if it works. You can continue to step 8 if you want to make the change permanent.

Step 2
Get the kernel source and headers for your installed kernel along with some prerequisites:

(Note: You don't need kernel-package or fakeroot for this, but if you want to build your entire kernel after this for a separate reason, you will have everything you need.)

If you get a warning saying linux-source is a virtual package, install the specific source package for your installed kernel, such as linux-source-2.6.31, linux-source-2.6.32, linux-source-2.6.33, etc. To find out what kernel version you are running, run uname -r.

Step 3
Now extract the kernel sources to a folder named src in your home directory, where VERSION is the version of your kernel sources. If you aren't sure, just do a ls /usr/src/linux-source*.bz2 to find it:

If it is not set it will return:# CONFIG_MOUSE_PS2_ELANTECH is not set

If the elantech option is not set, run make menuconfig and navigate to Device Drivers->Input device support->Mice and press space on the Elantech PS/2 protocol extension so that it has an asterisk like this:[*]. Then press the right arrow and enter repeatedly to back out of the menus, and then answer YES to save your config.

Step 5.5 - DELL MINI ONLY
For the Dell Mini (not sure about others), you will need to force version 2 by editing drivers/input/mouse/elantech.c after applying the original 4 patches, go to line 675 and remove these two lines:

IF IT WORKED
For ASUS machines, see page 8 for details on switching the tap buttons and a tweak to get Fn+F9 to work to toggle the touchpad on/off.

For the Dell Mini 10, or machines which have integrated buttons (if you press down on the touchpad surface to click), you may want to set AreaBottomEdge to 600 via xorg.conf, a udev rule, or synclient (see below). This will prevent the problem described here by disabling a lower border of the touchpad area. The value can be adjusted up or down to find the optimal setting. If this breaks things just set it back to 0.

Code:

synclient AreaBottomEdge=600

Similarly, AreaLeftEdge or AreaRightEdge (depending on orientation) can be set to disable the left or right hand border, if desired. A suggested starting value is 50: